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Katy’s Top Ugliest Bugs

Recently, I worked with a total of 240 middle school students on assessing freshwater environments. We collected bugs and learned about how bugs can be used as water quality indicators, etc. I got to talk to the girl interested in taxonomy (her most recent kick was owls), let the students pass around jars of caddis cases, and had fun watching the students react to this video on dragonfly larva. Who knew that beautiful dragonflies were hungry, vicious killers?

I got many questions: What’s your favorite bug? Are those it’s eyes? What is that!? But the one question that stumped me was from the boy that asked: What do you think is the ugliest bug? So I’ve thought about it and perused through my insect field guide to North America for ideas and here’s my top five. I tried to steer towards ugly and not scary. There’s a difference. I hope you’ll be surprised. Don’t expect any spiders (I elected to spend a full week on learning about spiders in Maine and I think jumping spiders are adorable.) Plus don’t expect any sort of maggoty larva (I started my first bug taxonomy on Diptera, so I am fairly immune).

But really. Crickets are creepy! I used the golden book insect guide as a child and the mole cricket drawing always freaked me out. And now as an adult, with access to photos of actual mole crickets, I confirm with my child brain. Mole crickets are ugly. It’s those pointy forearms, the dopey face, and blimpy body. No thanks.

So what do you think? Do you have an extremely ugly bug not on my list? Let me know, I’d love to hear about it!